As a spectacle it is as perfect as the best choreographic brains can make it.
Half an hour later, in a nearby café, I came across the hero and Zuléma slaking a tropical thirst with two tall steins of beer. The beautiful princess carried her stage shoes with her, wrapped in a newspaper. Presently I caught sight of the faithful maid hurrying to a cabinet particulier upstairs with a gentleman in a silk hat and a fur-lined overcoat. I afterwards learned that the maid and Zuléma did not speak.
Alas, all is not gold that glitters!
Chapter Four
BARS AND BOULEVARDS
There was a certain coziness about the “Bar du Grillon.” It was well named, this “Bar of the Cricket,” for, tho a public resort, it was thoroughly homelike.
The walls of the tiny room were of polished cherry, and masses of Jacqueminot roses adorned the bar.
Every day its charming proprietress, Madame Lucille de Bréville, stepped from her brougham, passed through the screen doorway, deposited the contents of the money-drawer in her golden purse, made a memorandum of it with a little turquoise-topped pencil which hung from her châtelaine, gave an extra touch to her wavy hair in a tiny mirror, and straightway became the most gracious of hostesses to a dozen old friends who dropped in during the afternoon and dined at eight.
A pretty woman is difficult to describe, but Lucille de Bréville was more than pretty; she was beautiful, exasperatingly so. It might have been the curve of her white throat, or the merriness in the depths of her violet eyes, or the grace of her matured and exquisite figure which gave her charm, for Lucille possessed all these. Better still, she had a heart of gold and a clever brain, both of which won for her many comrades who were too fond of her to make love to her. Lucille had had many love affairs. That was one reason why she became at thirty quite a serious proprietress of the Bar du Grillon. The pin money which it brought her gave her an interest in life, for most French women seem to inherit a little of the bourgeois blood of the commerçants. With her pin money she could do as she pleased; with her annuity it was different. There was always an accounting accompanying that. At thirty, Lucille had sold most of her jewels and with the proceeds founded a private charity, and had settled upon a frail old aunt who adored her a yearly amount sufficient to keep her in modest comfort to the end of her days.